The Super Summary of World History (35 page)

Henry VIII did more than just argue with Catholics over women and power. He set the foundations for the future might of England when
he
decided
to
build
the
most
advanced
navy
in
the
world
. His ships had the best cannons and the best designs. This decision, continued by his successors, was foundational and eventually made England the most powerful nation on earth for over 350 years.

Phillip,
King
of
Spain
and ruler of the Netherlands (at least he thought so), sent his army to fight the Dutch Protestants over their claim of independence (Holland, et al). It would be a war lasting eighty years. This was a tough war, fought over what amounted to salt marshes by troops wearing heavy armor pounding away with crude and inaccurate guns, long pikes, and heavy swords. The fighting gained little for Spain, and Phillip thought the so-called virgin queen of England (Elizabeth) was helping the rebels. So, following the custom of the day, Phillip sent diplomats to diplomatically tell the virgin queen to back off assisting the rebels. Elizabeth, following the custom of the day, gently replied she could do nothing of the sort, while lying and denying England was sending aid.—also part of the customs of the day. Naturally, this upset the Spanish king, but he still wanted a better reason to go to war, and Elizabeth gave it to him. There was another heir to the English throne,
Mary
Queen
of
Scots,
a Catholic enjoying wide support in England. She was, however, Elizabeth’s prisoner making it hard to push a claim. Mary made a few poor decisions and ended up charged with conspiring to kill Elizabeth (all true) which got her condemned to death. Soon her head was bouncing away from her otherwise gorgeous body, and the King of Spain had what he needed, a righteous reason to war with England.

King Phillip constructed the
Spanish
Armada
, a fleet consisting of numerous exceptionally outsized ships, to invade England. King Phillip planned to sail his fleet to Holland, load his waiting infantry aboard the massive ships, and thence sail to England and debark for conquest. Realizing he needed a lot of men to invade England, the Spanish king thought many large ships were necessary to haul the men and equipment. Phillip may have been right about the need for large ships, but did all of them have to be so large? Believing the Catholic God was on his side, King Phillip put the Armada to sea in
1588
with orders to sail for Holland.

Figure 31 Route of the Spanish Armada

Things immediately began to go wrong for the Armada. Many of the ships were not seaworthy, and the men had little training in sailing, firing cannons, or otherwise surviving at sea. When the Armada appeared on the British horizon the English sea dogs set out in their small, but very maneuverable, ships to meet the challenge. Elizabeth was ashore with her army, all decked out in gleaming armor and ready to fight, but armies were unnecessary in this battle. The highly experienced English seamen vigorously attacked the Armada, but the grand ships sailed on with little noticeable damage. The Armanda successfully sailed to Holland, but unfortunately for the Spanish
the
troops
were
not
ready
to
board.
Somehow, no one informed them when the Armada would arrive. Seeing this was a mess, the Spanish dropped anchor, waiting for the morrow while trying to figure out what to do.

The English had other plans. Seeing the Spanish at anchor, the English unleashed several fire ships, burning from stem to stern, at the stationary Spanish Galleons when the wind was right. The fire ships caused a general Spanish panic, and a few of their ships were lost, but mainly the Spanish were unnerved. With things deteriorating and no troops appearing for the invasion, the Spanish admiral made a bad decision. He decided to return to Spain, but
not
down
the
channel
—the way they came—but around Scotland and Ireland, and then back to Spain. The Spanish sailed north to their doom. On the way home tremendous storms struck the Armada tearing the vessels apart. The ships were not all that seaworthy anyway, and the massive storms simply gave them no chance. Nearly the entire Armada was lost at sea or driven onto the rocky Irish coast where plundering and murder awaited the warships and men courtesy of the area’s unruly inhabitants.

The loss of the Armada, by whatever means, was a huge blow to the Spanish war effort. Building the Armada drained the treasury, always bad news in a war, and the loss of men hurt as well. This began the loss of the worldwide Catholic empire. Meanwhile, England celebrated a miraculous victory. Elizabeth I became a legendary leader by way of the defeat of the Armada, and England would go on to secure its place as the world’s predominant sea power for 350 plus years (until the end of World War II in 1945). This was the start of the worldwide Protestant empire.

Europe
Undergoes
Vast
Change

The Catholic Church was undergoing a new beginning because of groups like the
Jesuit
order
founded in 1540 by
Ignatius
Loyola
. This spawned the
Counter-reformation
against the Protestants. Eventually, the
Council
of
Trent
(1545 to 1563) managed to stop the worst church offenses. None of this prevented the two warring Christian sides from murdering one another in the name of God. The Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648) devastated huge tracts of Europe, and the English civil wars (1642 to 1649) managed to do the same in England. The Puritans won in England, thereby allowing Oliver Cromwell to establish a virtual military dictatorship as “lord protector” (after beheading Charles I in 1649). These wars and beheadings failed to endear Catholics and Protestants to one another, so the fighting just went endlessly on. Cromwell died in 1658, followed in 1660 by the Restoration of the monarchy when Charles II became King of England. His son, James II, after losing a war with the Parliamentarians, lost his kingship which was assumed by the Protestant William of Orange, who became King in 1688. It was after this so-called Glorious Revolution that he took the crown as William III of England. Unknown to James II, he was the last Catholic monarch of England.

Another subtle, but extremely powerful, change was spreading in Europe.
Land
, the measure of wealth for probably 5,000 years, was becoming something less.
Money
—cash that is—created by trade and commerce was becoming the something more. Quickly, it seems from the record, the people at the pinnacle now longer held land. They had cash in the bank, ships for commerce, storehouses of goods, and other trappings of
capitalist
wealth. Landholders typically hold little cash. In feudal times land equaled power because people with land controlled commerce. Commerce was now flowing from fast growing cities where landholders had no say. As the merchants accumulated money and expanded their power, land was less valuable. Hard money was the language of the new era. This decreased the power of the landholding nobility somewhat, and it caused the monarchs pause, because their power was land based; after all, taxes came from land. Monarchs and parliaments learned to tax commerce to increase their wealth, but the nobility lacked that taxing power, so the landholders watched their power melt away into the cities of a new epoch.

While religious wars snuffed people out at a fantastic rate, something else was having a profound influence on religion and human endeavors of all types.
Science
was coming of age, and with the invention of the
printing
press
the spread of experimentally confirmed knowledge was assured.

Science
and
the
Printing
Press
(The
Road
to
Tomorrow)

1430

One
of
the
greatest
inventions
since
the
advent
of
language
and
agriculture,
the
PRINTING
PRESS
is
a
key
reason
the
modern
world
exists
as
it
does
today
.

Our modern world exists because of the printing press. In about
1430
,
Johann
Gutenberg
, a goldsmith in Germany, invented a method of printing using movable type, the precursor of the modern printing press. His press was so good it spread all over Europe and the world very quickly. At the same time the printing press was producing books and pamphlets in large numbers, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of science, and new political ideas were emerging and changing the world. Without the printing press such ideas may not have spread as quickly or might fail to spread at all. The printing press was so powerful that Muslim countries banned it in 1515 because it might spread Western learning.

Large numbers of people began reading as books and tracts became widely available. They included: the Bible as translated by Luther, the King James Bible (1611), the tracts on science by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, the political thoughts of Moore (
Utopia
1516), Machiavelli (
The
Prince
1513), philosophers like John Locke, and literature by Shakespeare (1553 to1616). Once these ideas moved off the press their power was limitless. Efforts by churches and traditionalist to thwart the growth of new ideas about the earth, the universe, and mankind were condemned to failure once the concepts hit the printing presses and a literate public.
[106]

The first book off the new printing press was the
Gutenberg
Bible
in
1455
. This book held the words of a man scourged and crucified in about AD 33 in the backwater Roman province of Palestine (modern day Israel). This poor fellow died crucified between two criminals, was not of noble birth or any kind of government official. His burial place was a cave with a rock rolled over the front. No one chiseled his words into stone like emperors or Pharaohs. He lived before the printing press, newspapers, tape recorders, radio, TV, or any modern method of keeping records of the spoken word. When he died, his friends said they did not know him, and his death went unrecorded in any official record we know about. It seems the only thing owned when he died was the clothes on his back which were filthy, blood-soaked rags after his scourging and crucifixion. He died alone, childless, no wife, without money, without worldly power or position on the dusty outskirts of Roman civilization. Before his crucifixion, he made a strange statement: “
Heaven
and
earth
shall
pass
away,
but
my
words
shall
not
pass
away
” (Matt: 24:35). His statement was confirmed, at least in the short run, when Gutenberg published the Gutenberg Bible, because the man who spoke those words was Jesus Christ. The most printed book on planet earth is the Bible carrying the words of Jesus Christ who suffered scourging and crucifixion outside the gates of the city of Jerusalem so long ago.
[107]

Yet, the printing press did not seem to be a friend of religion so long as it printed the words of men scouring the earth and the heavens for answers to the mysteries of life. The acceptance of the
scientific
method
was the key to advancing empirical knowledge, and the advance of mankind’s empirical knowledge grew spectacularly in Europe. This was the scientific revolution that was throwing out old ideas of an earth-centered universe through the work of
Copernicus,
Brahe,
and
Kepler
. By explaining the movement of the planets in the sky they were able to prove that the sun was the center of the solar system. It was the start of a new way of thinking. Before, people looked to the past or the books of Aristotle or Ptolemy to explain the world, but now people would not read the classics to see what was fact or fiction. Now people
tested
it
for
themselves
, and if the classic view failed the test, rejection was the result. New ideas based on
tested
facts
became the accepted view, and any new empirically proven “facts” survived only so long as they withstood testing. This brave new empirical world started during the Renaissance and zoomed ahead during the 1600s and 1700s in Europe
.
And
its
growth
never
stopped
accelerating.